The days of firing up a hex editor to hack in unlimited ammo or heath during a single player campaign to have a laugh about with are over, as we are entering an age wherein - with some probability - this type of activity would logically have to lead to your game being locked, even potentially your license to use it taken away entirely. Why? Well how can a company support or justify such a massive back-end payment scheme such as was outlined in the article to handle microtransactions when they allow a user to do the same activity without payment? Financially it doesn't make sense to allow such behaviour in any way.

Thus I would posit that the next form of DRM we will see as pervasive within the PC gaming industry will be much the same as we witnessed with Diablo III. You want to use that license for a game you purchased? Then you'll have to be connected to the providers servers with your game constantly verifying that you've not done something which isn't explicitly allowed by the mechanics of the game.

Please note that I deeply hope the above is Chicken Little-esque scaremongering and that it never comes to pass, but given the fact that several larger publishers are moving towards both F2P and microtransaction models, it seems all too possible. For those that enjoy playing about with the back end of a game, that enjoy modifying and cheating their single player, offline experiences, days may just be numbered.